Diabetes app questions

[MatthewCanUK]

This may be a duplicate post and if so I apologize. I wanted to ask a question to any diabetes nurses/educators, nurses with diabetes or anyone who sees a lot of diabetes patients in their practice. I have been a nurse for about 20 years but decided to go back to school to become a computer programmer. Part of the requirements of my program is to design a user-based program for a final project. The idea I had was to do a diabetes app for the phone directed at patients.

So, the question I have is this:

What kind of features have you heard patients suggest or would you want to see in an app that is supposed to help patients track and manage their diabetes effectively?

(ie. reminders for medications, alerts about low blood sugars, etc...)

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

I'd like to see larger text as an option at the very least.

A simple interface that doesn't require much searching. It it's too difficult, patients won't bother.

A blood glucose monitoring app should be simple, direct, easy to use, uncomplicated and have large type. If it were a companion program to something like "Lose it" or "Tap and Track" that could help them keep track of what they've eaten (and possibly see that glucose of 356 is somehow related to the ice cream and cake you had) but without requiring them to actually use the companion app until they're motivated to try it, it would be there if they were motivated to keep track of their food but keeping track of food shouldn't discourage them from keeping track of their sugars.

It should also have a place to record what your meds are and when you took them -- again, without being too cumbersome.